In this episode I share with you 4 different strategies that will help you get the most out of your nights sleep.
Sleep is becoming more and more important and if we do not achieve a good nights sleep, our productivity levels for the next day are way down.

Use the strategies within this episode to help you get more shut eye, more often.

Ladies and Gentleman, Hayden Wilson here for Learn Share Grow live and today I’m speaking to you all about creating a nightly routine that’s not only going to help you wind down a bit better, but it’s also going to help you get that perfect night’s sleep and help you wake up energised and recharged.

Before I implemented my nightly routine I would wake up terribly and almost have a bad morning because I was so tired because of what I did the night before and it wasn’t productive. If you can follow some of the strategies I’m going to show you today – I’ve got four to show you – then you’ve going to find that you’re sleeping a lot better, you’re a lot more productive the next day and in turn, you’ll be a lot more positive person to be around.

So the first thing that I want you to implement is consistency. When you go to bed at a consistent time every single night, within a one hour block - and I understand that there are going to be times when you’ve got a wedding, an event to go to – but generally, if you can try and stick to the one hour window, if possible even smaller, say every night you might want to commit to going to bed at 9.30 or 10 o’clock and that’s your bedtime. I know it sounds strange because we’re adults, but by having this bedtime and creating that structure it sets us up, not only for our nightly routine, but when that time comes around it’s time for sleeping and our brain starts to recognise that when we go to our bedroom this is time to sleep, but it’s also going to help us the next morning so we can start to get up earlier and start to do the things that we need to do first thing in the morning. If you didn’t watch my video on morning routines, jump back to Monday’s video or just search my name and ‘morning routine’ and you’ll find a lot more about morning routines and how important they are. But in order to have a good morning routine you need to have a good nightly routine. So I want you to be consistent when you start going to bed and just start taking more notice of when you are actually going to bed and be a bit more conscious of that.

The second thing that you want to do is to implement different relaxation techniques. An example of this might be meditation – there are a bunch of different applications that you might like to do - so just try some breathing exercises, you can be lying down, you can be sitting, the whole idea is to wind your brain down from a big day and really take it in, realise that it’s not as bad as it seems. You can just slow everything down, and it’s going to slow your heart rate and your brain is going to start to recognise ‘okay I can calm down now and actually get to sleep’ because what we’ve found is by sleeping more you are a lot more productive. It used to be the mantra of work hard, just keep working hard and grind it out and hustle and all these things that a lot of people still claim they do, who knows if they do, but what we need to realise is that by getting your 7 or 8 hours of sleep every single night, you’re going to be a lot more productive. These relaxation techniques are going to help you get to bed earlier.

For example, in my room, I have an aromatherapy device that sends off steam, I put some lavender drops in there, and I set it for half an hour – it’s got a nice dull light so I set it for half an hour while I’m trying to get to sleep and it just sends this nice mist into the air, completely healthy. It allows me to know that now it’s time for sleeping and I get into that zone, it’s nice, it’s relaxing, sometimes you can put on some nice music, something relaxing – I like rain sounds, a YouTube video of rain dropping on a tin roof – you might like to try a rain forest or you might like to try birds, cicadas, all of these different things are little tips and strategies that I’ve implemented that have helped me get a better night’s sleep. So look at different relaxation techniques and you’re really going to find that you can get to sleep a lot faster and that sleep’s going to be so much more productive – I know that sounds strange – but it’s such a better, deeper sleep by using these techniques rather than going to bed all wound up, and excited and crazed and a messy mind without these.

The next thing that I want to share with you is that the bed is for sleeping and perhaps one other thing, but I’m not going to mention it. So you need to have your bedroom as your sanctuary. You want to remove that TV, you want to remove all the different clocks, all the electronic devices - you want to make that bedroom as minimalistic as possible. In my bedroom I have a bed, a couple of bedside tables and a bookshelf at the end. Other than that, I try to keep it as basic as possible and this removes any distractions. I’m not watching TV until I fall asleep and then waking up at 2am with the TV going, distracted and whatnot. I know that as soon as I enter that bedroom it’s time for sleeping and then I can just totally chill out. This has been a game changer for me because I used to be that person that had the TV on and thought ‘oh it’s relaxing, I need to wind down’ and that’s fine if you have a wind down process and you build TV into it or that’s your relaxation process, that’s fine, but just don’t put it in the bedroom because you need that space, you need that sanctuary to know that this is the sleep zone and a distraction free zone. So I want you to remove all the different stuff in your bedroom and just have it as your private sleeping sanctuary.

The last thing that I want you to do, and this sort of stems off what I just said, I want you to have no technology. A big one that a lot of people struggle with is they’ll get to bed and then fall into the trap, and I used to be the same trust me, you need to check your Instagram, you need to check your facebook, one last check of the emails, that’s not going to hurt, whatever other social media platforms or forms of connection, and all these are other people’s demands on you. You need to just remove those and understand it can wait because realistically you’re trying to get to bed, what is a facebook notification going to do for you at night time? What is an email going to do? What is an Instagram – scrolling endlessly through – you know the feeling, you’re just scrolling through and you’re wishing and the time starts passing and all of a sudden it’s been an hour or an hour and a half, two hours, and you’re just scrolling, talking to people, and how productive has that been? What this does is you start to lose track of time when that happens. Then the next morning you find that you’re tired, you’re cranky, you’re unproductive, you sleep in, you can’t help but press that snooze button because you are so tired and the body does need rest. So I want you to switch off the tech. For me I actually put my phone on aeroplane mode while I sleep because I used to get a couple of notifications and all this stuff happening on my phone and almost in anticipation I’d wake up and want to check it just in case something happened, but I just turned all that stuff off and by putting it on aeroplane mode it stops me from even checking it, it’s not even an option. If I wake up in the middle of the night I discipline myself not to take it off aeroplane mode because I know how much better of a sleep you can have when you have zero distractions in your bedroom.

So the four things that you need to be doing are: getting to bed at a consistent time; looking into relaxation process such as meditation and breathing exercises; the next thing is to understand that the bed is for sleeping; and the last one is to have no technology.

So I hope that you can implement a lot of these strategies. If you need any help, of course, just message me, private message or chuck a message down below and I’m more than happy to help you out. Thanks for watching, this has been Hayden Wilson and my website is haydenwilson.com.au. Thanks for watching. Ciao.